Builds

Introduction

Environments give you a way to customize the build process for your application in order to produce different versions
of your applications for different environments from the same code base. All environment variables are accessible to
any build scripts that run during the npm run install and npm run build portion of your builds.

Predefined Environments

Every time a Build occurs, it’s done in a secure environment where we provide
some predefined variables which are key/value pairs that are made available in
the environment and are available by using
process.env.MY_VAR syntax
in NodeJS or via $MY_VAR syntax in a standard shell script.
These variables can be leveraged to customize the build and outputs.

The following environment variables are provided in every build, which can be accessed in build scripts:

CI_APP_ID(string): Your Ionic app’s unique ID.

CI_APP_NAME(string): Your Ionic app’s name.

CI_AUTOMATED_BUILD(int): Whether this build occurred as a result of an automation (0 for false, 1 for true).

CI_AUTOMATION_ID(optional int): The unique ID of the automation which created this build.

CI_AUTOMATION_NAME(optional string): The name of the automation which created this build.

CI_GIT_COMMIT_SHA(string): The SHA for the commit on which the build was run.

CI_GIT_COMMIT_MSG(string): The message for the commit on which the build was run.

CI_GIT_REF(string): The git ref from which the build was created (i.e. master).

CI_GIT_REF_TYPE(string): The git ref type (i.e. branch).

Custom Environments

In addition to the predefined environments, customers on the plans with access to automations
will have access to create custom environments.
With custom environments it’s easy to create and manage custom sets of key/value pairs
to further customize builds on Ionic Appflow. Common use cases include customizing your build process
in order to build staging & QA versions of your app that connect to different APIs
or to build different white labeled versions of your application.
To get started with custom environments, open the app you wish to work on and navigate in the sidebar to
Automate -> Environments, then click New Environment on the top right. You should see a form like this:

The environments dashboard also lists available custom environments along with their configured key/value pairs

Usage

For example you could replace your build script in the package.json with a custom shell script that
reads the branch and triggers a custom build.